Brotherwise Games provided a review copy of their new Super Mario Kart-style racing game, Dungeon Kart, so I was fired up to get this to the table. That’s because my eight-year-old son is a Super Mario Kart video game junkie. Dungeon Kart, set in the Boss Monster world of quick-playing card games from Brotherwise, looked like a perfect fit for him.

After completing a two-player set up for a father-son game night, we started and my son immediately showed concerns about the gameplay. He wanted to drive his kart as fast as possible, but the game only allows players to slowly ramp up their speed to keep drivers in check. In a two-player game, there were fewer chances to “bump” an opponent out of the way and—ideally—into a hazard or a wall to mess with their plans. (My son was really hoping to mess with my plans.)

By the time our first game wrapped up, he crossed the finish line first and won the game. Despite an obvious opportunity to share his potential love of the game—because, as we all know, winner’s bias is real—I could tell he was not interested in a second play.

“What did you think, buddy?” I offered, as he began to bolt upstairs to play with his army toys.

“It was OK. It’s…

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I stopped by the Arcane Wonders booth at SPIEL 2024 to check out the new game Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering. I was excited about it from the get-go: the cover art looked great, and the box offered one additional stand-out detail—the name of the designer, Matthias Cramer.

That’s because Cramer designed Glen More II: Chronicles, one of my all-time favorite games. While other games use a rondel mechanism to dictate turn order, I think Glen More II does rondels better than any other game I have tried. The combination of Cramer’s name here mixed with the fact that Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering is also a rondel game had me pre-sold on the idea that this would be worth a look.

The new version is based on Cramer’s original game, Kraftwagen, published back in 2015. While I have not played the previous game, two other people in my network had, and both indicated that while that first game was pretty good, there were some elements that rubbed them, as hardcore strategy players, the wrong way.

One of those two people, my buddy John (he of the Dusty Euros series), joined me for a demo of the new Kraftwagen at SPIEL to see how it played. And after our three-player demo game, John and I both agreed…

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Racing games have been around for a long time in the board game world. You can even classify games like Sorry, Candyland, and Snakes & Ladders as racing games. They involve moving pieces from a starting point to an end point, with the player reaching the finish line first being declared the winner.

However, if we narrow our focus to motorsports-themed racing games, the options become surprisingly scarce, as the majority of published board racing games revolve around either NASCAR or Formula 1 racing. Rallyman: DIRT stands out as perhaps one of the few examples of modern rally racing board games, a niche within the broader world of motorsports.

It's a pity to point out that rally racing, despite its thrilling nature, often gets overlooked in the motorsports hierarchy. This sport involves pushing high-performance vehicles to their limits on terrain unsuitable for such extreme driving conditions. It's this contrasting dynamic that makes rally racing exhilarating.

From a game design perspective, the sport of rallying offers a wealth of opportunities that go beyond simply replicating famous circuits like the Monaco GP, which is a common approach in many other racing games. Rally racing allows for the incorporation of diverse challenges such as uphill and downhill sections, jumps, drifting maneuvers, shortcuts, and treacherous surface conditions. As a game genre, rally racing…

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When I was a kid, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. I had a subscription to Dragon Magazine {1}. I read each issue cover to cover within a day or two of it reaching my mailbox. There are issues of that publication that resonated with me for decades after I read them.

• Issue 96 (April 1985) which was an April Fools issue with the adventure Nogard, designed entirely to make the point that your uber-powerful character built on cheats, lies, excessive Monty Hall syndrome, and who-knows-what-else needs to be retired.
• Issue 99 (July 1985) which had the article A Sharp Systems for Swords; this article changed everything about how I viewed magical weapons and armor, and their role within the greater story of the campaign.
• Issue 106 (February 1986)—this one had the article A Plethora of Paladins, an amazing look at what it means to dedicate your life to an alignment.

Each of these is a treasured memory in a life that needed treasured memories. The most treasured article I have from Dragon Magazine comes from issue 82 (February 1984) which included a complete game designed to be removed from the center of the publication, called The Baton Races of Yaz. This was a two player relay-style game on a strange planet with almost perpetual rain…

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A little glimpse into my past: Video games were a major passion of mine before I discovered the joys of board games. I doubt my story is unique—like many PC gamers back then, I was obsessed with first-person shooters. But my second love was racing games, though not the uber-realistic sims. I gravitated towards the arcadey racers, where drifting and nitro boosts flowed as freely as coins in a Mario game.

As someone who loves board games and has a soft spot for racing video games, my options are quite slim. For the past few years, the only racing board game that has truly captured my heart is HEAT: Pedal to the Metal. However, that game focuses more on hand management than delivering an authentic racing experience. Most other racing board games either lean too heavily on dice rolls or become ridiculously convoluted in their attempts to simulate the intricate details of an F1 race.

REM Racer promises to be none of these things. The track doesn’t have a grid to represent spaces on the board. Instead, you move your vehicles using template movement rulers that you would find in a miniatures wargame. That’s not a surprise, because the publisher behind this one is Corvus Belli, a Spanish company. Corvus Belli is mostly known for their miniatures wargame, Infinite,…

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MLEM is a push-your-luck game with straightforward rules. Every round, each player loads one of their cats onto a rocket ship, starting with the commander for that mission and moving clockwise around the table. The choice of cat matters, since each has a unique power, but we’ll come back to that.

[caption id="attachment_295630" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Full team present and accounted for.[/caption]

Once the rocket is fully manned, the commander gets rolling. The mission starts with six dice, rolled all at once. The results are grouped by value—all the twos together, all the threes, and so on—and the commander decides which groups get used to move the rocket forward. There are a few things to keep in mind here.

The first: the rocket moves the sum of the values of the used dice. If the commander uses two ones and a three, the rocket moves five spaces. The second: used dice are removed from the pool for the rest of the mission, and in order to use any die showing a given value, you have to use all the dice showing that value. The third and final thing: only the values shown on…

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As I started to make my way through the instruction manual for Five Peaks, from designer Adam Strzelecki and publisher Trefl, I quickly realized that I’d seen this game before. “Oh,” I said, “this is Concordia.”

At this point in my life, having played so many games over the years that my mind is a free-associating cloud of mechanisms and rules, I often read rulebooks and think of comparative benchmarks. It’s only natural. Despite the rumors, I too am human, and we love patterns. I don’t believe I have become uncharitable about this, though. It isn’t often that I look at a game and think, “Oh, this is [insert title].” The bar for that remains high.

Five Peaks clears it with ease.

It uses the same hand management system as Concordia. Each turn, you play one card from your hand and perform the action shown on the card. These cards allow you to move about the board, or collect resources, or buy new cards from the market. Any cards that you play stay down on the table until you play the card that lets you pick up all your cards.

Five Peaks uses the same resource management system as Concordia. You’re restricted to ten items, represented by the ten slots on your individual board. You have to manage…

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When I picked up a copy of Evacuation (2023, Delicious Games) at SPIEL 2023, I had to admit—the thing didn’t look that special.

However, I am a sucker for anything with a big spaceship on the cover, so it had that going for it…and, designer Vladimír Suchý has made a couple games that I’m fond of, including Underwater Cities and the very good Pulsar 2849. Since Suchý crushed it with Pulsar 2849, I figured, hey, the guy seems to like complex space games, right?

On the strength of the review from our friends at ThinkerThemer, I got my copy of Evacuation to the table in recent weeks. Much like the tagline for the old game Mastermind—”Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master”—Evacuation is a straightforward teach, a game that could be taught in about 20 minutes.

But the consequences of the actions across the game’s tight playtime? This is the heaviest Suchý design I’ve played. (BGG seems to agree.)

The World is On Fire (Again)

Evacuation’s approach is straightforward. Our planet is in ruins thanks to rising temperatures, so we’ve got to get everyone off this rock and onto a more habitable planet, stat. (The rulebook’s version of events is much better than that,…

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Board game remakes are having a moment right now. It seems like every publisher is raiding the tombs of titles that have been gathering dust for over a decade and giving them a fresh new look. The 1990s in particular saw a boom in board game releases, with publishers like Avalon Hill putting out many popular games. One such title was Robo Rally, a robot-themed racing game. After lying dormant for years, Renegade Games has resurrected Robo Rally using the services of lawyers and necromancers. They plan to revive several other classic Avalon Hill games in similar fashion, refreshing these titles for a new generation of players.

Robo Rally is a board game that has flown under the radar for many years, but its premise is easily grasped. You and your friends are all robots in a factory. When the workday ends and the humans go home, these robots come alive and decide to have some fun by racing each other around the factory floor after hours by going to checkpoints in a specific order. With lasers, conveyor belts, rotating gears, and bottomless pits littering the makeshift race courses, you can see where the chaos can ensue, assuming OSHA doesn’t get involved.

All of this sounds pretty good until you realize you are all robots. Robots lack human judgment…

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Twisted Metal.

The long-time PlayStation video game car combat series is maybe my favorite all-time PS experience. Although I have enjoyed playing through all of the games—Twisted Metal 2 took up so much of my time that I should have gone blind staring at the screen for so long—Twisted Metal: Black is the undisputed best of those games.

But all of the Twisted Metal titles feature the same things: taking on the “character” of a driver whose car is used to murder every other combatant off the map, using weapons that were picked up in the field of play as well as special abilities that could be triggered a few times in each match. The lore was insane with Twisted Metal; save for one or two characters in each game that were ostensibly “good” (former cops, a priest, etc.), everything about the games really was twisted, right down to the game series’ signature character, Sweet Tooth, a demonic-looking clown that drove an ice cream truck that happened to have a missile launcher.

Sweet, indeed.

Thunder Road: Vendetta (2023, Restoration Games) is a take on the 1980s board game Thunder Road, which may have been one of the inspirations for the original Twisted Metal video games. (Because video game adaptations are hot, yes, there is a Twisted Metal TV…

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Fast forward with me into a future when tourists can hop aboard a Falcon X and visit the moon. Perhaps you have come to the moon to check out the Tycho crater, which you have seen from afar, or the Sea of Tranquility that Neil Armstrong walked upon decades ago. Like him, all of us astro-tourists are jumping and leaping around each other weightlessly. Well, here we are and now we are all vying to get as close to the most coveted craters.

[caption id="attachment_280458" align="alignnone" width="768"] The game box and board partially opened. It's so neat![/caption]

Space flight has been achieved! Which crater shall we visit?

The objective of the game is to score the most points by securing the most advantageous spots on the single-lane raceway made of up craters. Winning points are calculated by multiplying the number on the token with the value on the crater space.

Game play is simple; after each player has chosen their token color, the game begins with the youngest player's starting roll. Players place and move their tokens on the board by matching them with the number on the dice roll. Each astronaut's initial move begins on any of the available red starting craters. In consecutive moves astronaut tokens that match the…

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It’s easy for racing games to go wrong. If the design is too simple, it risks becoming simplistic, with decisions and player investment at a minimum. If the simple fact of not knowing when each piece is going to cross the finish line were enough, racing games would be nothing more than some track, a few molded horses, and a couple of dice.

As they approach complexity, racing games run an equally perilous risk: too much mechanism between players and the board dilutes that racing feeling. Many games are, fundamentally, races. Root is a race to 30 points, but the mechanisms are such that it doesn’t feel like one. That’s fine. It isn’t trying to. Cubitos is explicitly a race, yet doesn’t fully feel like one. Camel Up, Winner’s Circle, Flamme Rouge, these are games that manage to thread the racing needle. They tap into something special. The primal thrill of a race is undeniable. People laugh, they groan, they cheer. Racing may be the most fundamental of all competitive impulses. Who would argue that mancala was invented before the footrace?

So it was with a degree of skepticism that I greeted news of famed war-game publisher GMT’s Charioteer: Race for Glory in Ancient Rome, from designer Matt Calkins. GMT are synonymous with designs that include multiple…

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Before I dived into board games, I was an avid video gamer, and one of my favorite genres was arcade racing games like Top Gear for the Super Nintendo. 

When I immigrated to this colored cardboard land known as board games, one of the first games I acquired was Formula Dé. That was a mistake. Roll to move, hours to finish, and as exciting as unsalted Wheat Thins.

Despite not being satisfied with Formula Dé, I continued trying different racing games. I played Thunder Alley and liked it, but didn't love it. A friend then introduced me to Race! Formula 90, an overly complex Formula racing game that required me to use a whiteboard to know whether my car had made the corner.

When I learned that Heat: Pedal to the Metal (now just called Heat) was coming out, I was intrigued. It was developed by the same people behind Flamme Rouge, a bike racing game where you used cards to move your cyclists instead of dice or complex rules. I wasn’t a fan of Flamme Rouge not because of its concept but its execution. The game felt far too simple for my tastes, and I was hoping Heat would give it the gas it needed. 

It’s time we wave the flag down and get this going.

HEAT: Pedal to the Metal Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.